Which language for the desktop
It’s now been five months since Havoc first wrote abuot whether the open-source desktop should stick with C or move to Mono, Java, Python, or something else. Every point he brought up in that initial essay on the reasons why that discussion needs to take place was very valid. ” Every month without a coherent open source managed runtime answer – something we can start using across the board in the major projects – risks losing developer mindshare and the open Internet to a de facto Microsoft lock-in.” Has any progress been made? Mono seems to be making small inroads into various areas, especially (unsurprisingly) with Novell’s hackers (f-spot, dashboard, beagle), but Havoc’s points about the community’s feelings for Mono (“Cloning .NET on Linux may speed up adoption of Microsoft’s technology, handing them the Internet on a silver platter. Speeding up the competition’s success is not the way to catch up with them. Fear of this is widespread.“) are also well-taken.
Has any progress been made beyond the initial flurry of discussion that came about after Havoc’s post?
I think Mono is a great idea (see my blog for why), but in it’s current form – especially in the IDE dept. – it risks converting more people to .NET rather than to Mono.
Mono really needs to innovate and grab mindshare as a cross-platform framework rather than just ‘.NET for UNIX’ otherwise the Linux community won’t take it seriously.
4 hours later
I’m no coder, I often say that to you Aq. (Wow, the live preview is ace!)
I’m about to learn Python, to fiddle about for a very simple personal project. I hope it’s as good as you say :-D
27 hours later
Matt: it’ll be interesting to see how you get on!
29 hours later